Christmas is for Children

This year has been quite a trying year for us.  Everything that you could imagine going wrong pretty much has.  Lenora Mattingly Weber put it best when she said, “Christmas is for children.  But it is for grown-ups too.  Even if it is a headache, a chore, and nightmare, it is a period of necessary defrosting of chill and hide-bound hearts.”  This year, our Christmas was for our children.

Everyone has challenges in their lives – to think anything else would just be ridiculous.  One of my biggest challenges this year was to find the Christmas spirit despite having no desire to even start looking for it.  So, I put on a brave face and tried to get into the swing of things.

My first attempt at getting into the Christmas spirit involved music.  We have a HUGE collection of Christmas CD’s.  The CD’s are tucked away in a box, somewhere, having been long ago imported into my iTunes music collection.  It seems that every year just prior to Thanksgiving I throw together a mix of ten or so CD’s worth of songs (I have a little more than 25 hours’ worth of Christmas music in iTunes).  On Thanksgiving night we always pull out the current years mix and stuff the CD changer to capacity.  This year I didn’t even think to do that until December 12^th.

Our next effort in getting the Christmas spirit going was to put up the tree.  Normally, we would do this Thanksgiving weekend.  Truthfully, we didn’t start the process until December 16^th and we were still working on it on the 18^th.  I promise you that I did not put a single ornament on the tree.  It was all my children this year – my two beautiful daughters doing almost all of the work.

On my desk I have a business card holder that my wife made for me in a ceramics class many years ago.  I try to keep it stocked with pass-along cards for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  (To be honest, I don’t think anyone has ever taken one; and I know that nobody has ever asked for one…)  I try to keep the card with the most relevant picture on top – Christ emerging from the tomb at Easter time, the baby Jesus in the manger at Christmas, etc…  Normally, the second Thanksgiving is over the manger picture comes to the forefront.  Not this year.  It was December 20^th when I remember to make the change.

One of the biggest things that touched our hearts this year was something that happened to us out of the blue.  Our Christmas budget had been severely impacted this year and we had talked to our children about having Santa Claus skip us because we could not afford to pay him like in years past.  What we did not tell them, though, was that someone was doing a secret Santa for us (that’s the part that came to us out of the blue).  The children were all good with it despite the potential implications.  So, when they got up Christmas morning all they had were their stockings and a few presents from their parents.  And they were, to my total amazement, 100% happy with it.  As we left for church, my wife was the last person out of the house.  While we were sitting in the car she placed all of the secret Santa stuff out so that it would be there when we returned from church.  When we got home the children went into the house and were amazed by new piles of gifts.  To see their gratitude and excitement was probably the thing that got me closest to having the Christmas spirit.

Christmas came and went.  Our family went to a few family parties and we even had relatives stay with us for a couple of nights, but the Christmas spirit never really touched me or my wife.  Eric Sevareid has said, “As long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, Christmas is.”  In our hearts we knew what “Christmas ought to be.”  And that is why this year we did Christmas for our children.